You can’t start rebuilding an entire house until you destroy the old one right to the foundations. I have neither the patience nor the inclination to wait until I’m too old and that responsibility falls on my children’s backs.

They set the rules, so play by their rules. Burn it. Steal. Lie. Cheat. Whatever it takes to crush the system to the ground, to leave the parasites without a host until they turn on each other.

START TAKING THEM AT THEIR WORD. No different from the muslim who yells “death to America” – we don’t doubt them anymore, and we shouldn’t doubt the leftist yells “by any means necessary.” Take them up on it.

They’ve had all options on the table from the beginning while we’ve sat on our hands. We think they’re young and uninformed and stupid; THEY THINK WE ARE EVIL. We smile paternally and tell ourselves they’ll grow out of it while they’re sharpening the axes they’ll Lizzie Borden our asses with.

Take whatever you can get your hands on. Take every dollar the government offers in any program you can get signed up for. The faster we push this shit to its inevitable endgame, the faster we can start over.

Neither the jubilation from my American friends nor the despair from, well, you guys, are particularly warranted. The candidates were really not that different from each other. America has been divided roughly 50-50 for a very long time. Very little can be done legislatively in either direction. There are no revolutions anymore, only inflection points. At best, as Charles Krauthammer wrote, this one reverses the Reagan one.

I like Obama personally because I think I’d act and respond in similar ways to the demands of American politics, i.e. utter contempt for the kabuki theatre of kissing babies, rolling up sleeves of wife-beater shirt, shouting zero-depth slogans to ball-capped wankers at rallies. But he’s no socialist or progressive, at least by international standards. He kowtows to the Israel lobby, plinks at brown kids with drones, and remains beholden to corporations, hardly less than the other guy.

Shove it up your ass, Yarbouti (5).
I tolerated your crap for years, because it didn’t really threaten me. Today, it does. My tolerance has been used as a weapon against my freedom, so it is no longer available.

You and your ilk are so corrupted by the collectivist sickness that you’d argue about the relative merits of Stalinism vs Maoism (among others). They are vile perversions of reality that debase civilization, humiliate humanity, crush individual worth, and slaughter millions. There is no “better” version of any form of statism. Your the-rest-of-the-world view argues about the relative merits of “good” statisms (see: 1918-1945). There is no moral difference. The rest of the world is nothing but a long list of how NOT to govern.

“America is not Europe and hasn’t been since 1776. That’s the whole frigging point of America.” — me

America not only appeared less divided in the past, the differences in the routine choices were actually smaller. I remember a time when the people now in office would have been driven out of any employment or position of influence in most communities. We tolerated their jackassery to some extent, but we didn’t accept it. Now, we’re called insensitive or racist if we don’t automatically kowtow to it. However, progressivism and the other forms of collectivism are not tolerant. They have corrupted and twisted the language enough to make Orwell dizzy. Freedom of speech, individual conscience, honesty, and mutual trust are no longer expected or even tolerated. The argument between statism and individualism is no longer recognized as important or even legitimate (i.e. the philosophy is settled). At best, individual freedom is considered quaint. At worst, it’s considered racism or treasonous disrespect for the right authority, then it’s turned on itself and used to diminish the real freedom of the individual. Deviation from one’s assigned group gets one hounded as a race traitor. Re-education camps exist in all but name.

The question is whether or not our constitutional contract exists anymore, whether we are still a salvageable republic where citizens work for their own ends, or whether we have degenerated irretrievably into just another mob of subjects to be exploited as tools for someone else’s ends (e.g. for one’s own good, for the greater good, etc.).

So, uhm, like, you know … f*ck off! srsly.
You are my enemy, the enemy of liberty.
I would have kaiboshed your offensive jackassery; but I want you in the stocks on the village green, here, so we can hurl rotten vegetables, spittle, and manure at you. That’s all the martyrdom you’re gonna get, here, though. Sorry.

Well, Shiek Yarby! I should have guessed that you come visit us
today! Your comments are most interesting, particularly from
the viewpoints of Alfred Korzybski, who thoroughly described &
defined the basis of some of your sociopathic writings, IMHO.
I’m doing some research in the field of General Semantics
as it applies to psychotherapy. Your comments are such a
glowing example of various aspects of speaking or writing
in ways that are not a reflection of reality. What makes them
so valuable to my project is your outstanding ability to
write with a masterful command of the English language.
Would you mind if I use them in the context of this post &
comment thread, to illustrate the psychological & mental
aspects of the theories that I’m learning, using & teaching?

If you were sufficiently civilized, you’d have left and respected our day of – frankly – grief, for the lost future of our children and our nation. (Remember Japan’s “lost generation”? They did not recover, and we are handing our children a worse legacy.)

We recognize that we have been on this path for several presidencies, and efforts to turn it back have been insufficient. This is the nail in the coffin.

By all means gloat, if it makes you feel special. You’re riding the same train to hell with the rest of us, but do us a favor and go sit in another car. I’d return the favor by trolling your sites to dump salt in your wounds when they occur, but frankly I don’t give enough of a shit to take the time.

Sheiky @ 5: “Very little can be done legislatively in either direction.”

You haven’t been paying attention, you snotweasel. The way Congress is supposed to operate, the House of Representatives has the power of the purse, to choke off funding for initiatives they don’t approve. That hasn’t held recently. We haven’t had a budget in over three years, and if there’s no budget, there are no appropriations to choke off. Obama merely has the Treasury (part of the Executive Branch) print up money and send it wherever. That’s how they’ve managed to piss away America’s wealth.

If he wants the fig leaf of legislation, he whips up an executive order (he lambasted Bush for signing 94; h’ already up to 920). He also bypasses Congress by allowing all the federal agencies to crank out regulations, something Congress is normally part of.

Smells imperial to me, not republican (with a small “R”).

I’ll say this is a way you can’t misunderstand: this is how Chavez operates.

I rarely comment here if at all, but I quietly sit here in the back of the room every morning, cup of joe in hand, reading. This is a great place to be. Thank you so much for your comment DougM. I woke up so depressed this morning, it was like….what are we going to do now? What’s going to happen to my disabled daughter
when Obamacare kicks in full force? I suppose we have no other choice but to keep fighting the good fight. But seriously, I just didn’t give a shit this morning. I want to thank you DougM for explaining in words so well, everything I feel. Getting rid of that big wad of spit felt awful good this morning. Again….thx.

Punky (13),
Thanks, but thank Missy (my pet name for our hostess, Sondra).
She allows me to play in her sandbox with never a discouraging word.
To me, it’s either self-entertainment or personal therapy (hey, why would one ever need a shrink with access to a great blog and a shooting range).
It does my heart good when others gain a measure of solace, inspiration, insight, or just a chuckle.
Today, I figured we all needed opportunities to vent.
(What? Well, okay, I needed it, anyway.)

Peggy: I’ve come to visit today out of curiosity about your reaction to the outcome, sure, but if there is one thing I never, ever do, it’s gloat. As you point out correctly, it would be the nadir of classlessness.

Not only do I not feel that this is my victory (for reasons stated in my original response, I do not identify with the victor) but most of the causes that stir my heart involve supporting underdogs, in one way or another. As a result, odds being what they are, I get my arse kicked considerably more frequently than I do not. Believe me when I say that I can identify dark linings in every silver cloud.

I am, on the other hand, trying to point out that you’re overreacting greatly. You see President Obama and his administration as socialist. I am not even sure if he’s especially left of centre. Their health care reform is more timid than the plan once proposed by Nixon. Their oversight of Wall Street even after the pre-2008 excesses is feeble. Their foreign policy is barely distinguishable from that of Obama’s predecessor, good-cop trappings aside. There’s nothing sweeping or transformative here. And nothing will change.

You might also be nostalgic for an America that never really existed. The rugged individualism of the frontier persisted about as long as there was a piece of frontier left to grab. I wonder, sometimes, whether you could genuinely approve of any Republican president of the past century, apart from Reagan. The Bull Moose busted trusts, Ike expanded the New Deal, Nixon sought health care reform and was a bit of a softie on the environment, Ford was a moderate with a progressive stance on social issues…

Anyway, I don’t begrudge you the therapeutic effect of a few rotten veggies tossed my way today, and off I duly fuck.

^ “I am not even sure if he’s especially left of centre.”
That destroys your credibility right there.
Clearly, your point is disconnected from objective reality and you are arguing as fantasist.
That, jackass, is why this America is so fragmented. We aren’t even in the same reality with the left.

P.S. When I get to be King, anybody who puts those little twist-tie thingys on anything from loaves of bread, to fairly sophisticated electronic parts, in anything but a clockwise motion, will be drawn, quartered, sauteed, deep-fried, and gang-raped [pre & post death] by our little arab muslim friends.

Sheikh – There are more battles going on right now than the one at the federal level. Unless you attend city hall meetings, county council meetings, school board meetings (etc.) and get involved in the sausage making, you may not realize what a huge dismal mess we are really in. Maybe you do. I don’t know you, and therefore have no idea of your level of involvement.

The degradation runs all the way to the core: federal, state, and local. This isn’t about nostalgia for some American dream that never existed. I frankly find that idea condescending. Every time has its issues and its problems. I feel fortunate to have been born in this time and place, but I believe we are moving in a negative direction. Furthermore, I believe the pace at which we are becoming dysfunctional is accelerating. When immigrants from tyrannical states say they are alarmed by the transition they are observing, I tend to believe them. I don’t need to experience suffering first-hand to appreciate that it exists and to value their criticisms.

This is about recognizing the very distinct and identifiable erosion of property rights, privacy, and individual freedom that has taken place over our lifetimes. It seems to be snowballing at an alarming rate. I could put together a timeline of several specific restrictions on my freedom that have been created in just the last ten years. But let me give you just two very small examples, out of a freaking plethora: our back yard contains a “critical area” – an area at the bottom of a hill where water collects and it gets a little spongy when it rains. Because of this, a portion of our property (like virtually every other property in our town) has been identified as a “potential” wet land. That categorization means that if we want to till space for a garden, we need to purchase a permit from the city to “mitigate” the environmental damage we may have caused. Never mind that the payment of a fee does nothing to actually ameliorate any damage; never mind that nobody is required to prove that damage actually exists! If we want to plant a garden, we now must pay a “land disturbance fee”, and we can’t till within 100 feet of the “critical area”. The “critical areas ordinance”, CAO, did not exist when we bought this place. It has taken effect in the last five years. Farmers have it worse: I know of two who had their livelihoods quite literally destroyed because a local “sustainability” group took it upon themselves to inspect their properties and allege clean water violations – even though the storm water in question was confined to a ditch on the property itself and did not flow into any stream or shared water supply. The non-profit group I am referring to applies for federal grants to fund its activities. They proffer their services as consultants to planning departments, and insert their members into unelected government advisory boards. So these people feed at the public trough and have the luxury of spending their time pursuing their personal agendas – at the expense of the rest of us who have jobs and pay the taxes that feed their projects. These are stimulus dollars at “work” – destroying people’s jobs and lives. It’s really quite sickening. Want to know the really fun part? When public-private partnerships are formed, transparency is lost, because non-profit organizations are not obligated to the same public disclosure rules that government agencies are.

Have you ever heard of a home occupation ordinance? Do you believe a person has the right to privacy in his own home? Regulations in our county dictate the maximum square footage a person can use, in his own home, for business purposes. To my way of thinking, existing nuisance ordinances could cover most circumstances where a home business might cause issues with neighbors – but this is not sufficient for overweaning bureaucratic types who feel the need to micromanage other people’s lives. So we have a whole raft of arbitrary and haphazardly applied rules regarding home occupations. For all the talk about economic hardship, governments at every level put up roadblocks to job creation – all the while paying lip service to the small business owner and the entrepreneurial American spirit.

There is a bottomless well of harmful regulations, and on any given day a person is very likely to violate a handful without even realizing it. Sometimes it gets noticed, and the person gets penalized.

If you’re of the “progressive” persuasion, then maybe you welcome this kind of control. I can tolerate some baloney, if it doesn’t overly inconvenience me or cost me too much. I believe most people are well meaning and want to do good. But it doesn’t take very many people who are less than honorable to game the system and abuse authority. These people range from the lazy, to the mendacious, to the truly malevolent petty power trippers, to the idealogues who see government as a vehicle for achieving their own (necessarily shortsighted) visions of utopia.

Barack Obama, in my opinion, has several of these traits. I am cynical enough to think that most career politicians have severe character flaws, or they wouldn’t be drawn to politics in the first place. Comments about “revenge” are not to be taken lightly, particularly when you look at them in the context of his associations and his background – which both the press and surprisingly many Obama supporters are curiously un-curious about! Furthermore, this man seems to delight in instigating class warfare and flaming racial hostilities.

And while you assert that Obamacare is not particularly transformative, I vehemently beg to differ. My life’s circumstances and associations have allowed me to be witness to transformations of our medical system that have occurred during the last 30 years. There is major transformative shit hitting the fan, and this time it has the Supreme Court’s silver kiss. We really are actually screwed on this.

As to previous presidents paving the path with their own statist programs, you are absolutely correct, and that has brought us to this sorry place. The whole frog-in-the-pot analogy. It might interest you to know that Nixon’s EPA director, Bill Ruckelshaus, lives in our state (Washington) and is still involved in crafting environmental policy (check out the Ruckelshaus Bill, to see what I am alluding to). Old bureaucrats never die, apparently.